To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
That unrest formed a heart.
—Paul Celan
During a dinner with friends the talk turns, as it often does these days, to the problem of anxiety: how it is consuming everyone; how the very technologies that we have developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety have only degraded the quality of the former and exacerbated the latter; how we all need to “give ourselves a break” before we implode. Everyone has some means of relief—tennis, yoga, a massage every Thursday—but the very way in which those activities are framed as separate from regular life suggests the extent to which that relief is temporary (if even that: a couple of us admit that our “recreational” activities partake of the same simmering, near-obsessive panic as the rest of our lives). There is something circular and static to our conversation, which doesn’t end so much as frazzle indeterminately out. And though there is always some comfort in comparing maladies, I am left with the uneasy feeling that my own private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective—or no, not that, increased by not becoming collective, increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context, like that penetrating but enervating stab of self one feels sometimes in an anonymous crowd. It is a full day later before it occurs to me that not once, not in any form, not even with the ghost of a suggestion, did any of us mention God.
The greatness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet. How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great for us to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name. Thus an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think. Life has accelerated greatly since Joyce’s time, and now, as our selves scatter into bits and bytes, and our souls, if we are conscious of them at all, diminish to little more than a vague wish for quiet, even the linear associativeness of Ulysses can seem quaint.
How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing awareness of his absence (“Be present with your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne puts it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that any consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?
by Christian Wiman, The American Scholar | Read more:
image credit:
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
That unrest formed a heart.
—Paul Celan
During a dinner with friends the talk turns, as it often does these days, to the problem of anxiety: how it is consuming everyone; how the very technologies that we have developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety have only degraded the quality of the former and exacerbated the latter; how we all need to “give ourselves a break” before we implode. Everyone has some means of relief—tennis, yoga, a massage every Thursday—but the very way in which those activities are framed as separate from regular life suggests the extent to which that relief is temporary (if even that: a couple of us admit that our “recreational” activities partake of the same simmering, near-obsessive panic as the rest of our lives). There is something circular and static to our conversation, which doesn’t end so much as frazzle indeterminately out. And though there is always some comfort in comparing maladies, I am left with the uneasy feeling that my own private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective—or no, not that, increased by not becoming collective, increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context, like that penetrating but enervating stab of self one feels sometimes in an anonymous crowd. It is a full day later before it occurs to me that not once, not in any form, not even with the ghost of a suggestion, did any of us mention God. The greatness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet. How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great for us to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name. Thus an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. And thus a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think. Life has accelerated greatly since Joyce’s time, and now, as our selves scatter into bits and bytes, and our souls, if we are conscious of them at all, diminish to little more than a vague wish for quiet, even the linear associativeness of Ulysses can seem quaint.
How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing awareness of his absence (“Be present with your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne puts it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that any consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?
by Christian Wiman, The American Scholar | Read more:
image credit:
